The present application relates to processing of forms, and more particularly to techniques for processing electronic forms having at least one field that is configured to accept multimedia information as input.
Forms are a common aspect of business and civic life. People fill out forms for a wide array of purposes. With the widespread use of computers, an increasing number of forms are now provided in electronic form and filled in using a computer. An electronic form may comprise a list of fields, each field configured to accept information of a particular type or value. Indeed, a rich array of software is presently available for constructing electronic forms. Such software allows a form creator to specify the list of fields to be included in a form. The form creator may also specify the type of information and/or a range of allowed values accepted by the form fields. For example, for a name field configured to accept information identifying the name of a person, the form creator may specify that the information input in the name field must be text information. As another example, for an age field configured to accept information identifying the age of a person, the form creator may specify that the information input in the age field must be of numeric type.
Various applications are also presently available for validating or checking electronic forms. Validation involves checking if the requisite information has been entered in the electronic form, checking the type of information entered in the fields of the electronic form, checking value ranges of the entered information, or even testing that a value entered in a field is unique within a certain database. A form is generally considered validated when all the requirements and conditions associated with the form or fields of the form are satisfied.
In most conventional forms, the fields are generally configured to accept text, numeric, or date information and validation is performed on these types of information. However, electronic forms in the future are likely to include fields that are configured to accept other types of information besides text, numeric, or date information. For example, electronic forms may comprise fields that are configured to accept as input multimedia information such as audio information, video information, or image format data. Techniques are desired for facilitating creation and validation of such multimedia forms.